Sunday, July 31, 2016

There was a very good post at Ichigoji about the Iaijtsu practiced within a high ranking family during the Shogunate period. it was relatively peaceful at that time and at any rate, a high ranking official really had less need to be a deadly swordsman, yet they still practiced. Why?They continued to study in order to polish their minds so that they could do their administrative jobs; to live their lives better.Below is an excerpt. The full post may be read here.

Virtually any field of human endeavour and achievement is
influenced by more than just the need for practicality. It is this aspect, the
human and cultural dimension that, as much as anything else, has shaped and
distinguished the different styles of classical martial arts. The wants and
needs of societies as well as individuals leave their marks on each style, and
these may be quite different how we imagine them.

It is axiomatic in the world of Japanese martial arts that ‘if
the kokoro (mind) is not correct, the sword will not be correct’. While kokoro
(and mind, for that matter) is a term that is open to many interpetations, let
us take it , in this case, as being ‘attitude’ or ‘way of thinking’. This, of
course, begs the question, What is the correct attitude?

The answer may not be as simple as it seems, and the
dimensions that it touches may be the reason that, on and off, so much of the
discourse on martial arts has been flavoured with large helpings of philosophy,
mysticism and spirituality. While in some ryu-ha this tends towards the
religious (especially in those schools which maintain a close connection with
particular shrines and/or deities); in others, it is more philosphically or
morally inclined. This connection seems to date from early in the development
in swordsmanship, although given the prominence of religion in medieval
societies, this is not surprising.

In modern budo, the aspect of moral/spiritual training has continued,
with disciplines such as kendo and kyudo stating their aim as being a honing of
the human spirit by using martially flavoured practice as a tool. (It must be
admitted that this may not be readily apparent to the casual observer).

It is rare, however, to see these influences addressed
explicitly and lucidly by advanced practitioners of a pre-modern style in any
more than a cursory way, in English, at least, which is why it can be so
interesting when they do appear.
One such work is ‘Muso-Jikiden Eishin Ryu. The Iai Forms and
Oral Traditions of the Yamauchi Branch’ by Yamakoshi Masaki, Tsukimoto Kazutake
and translated by Steven Trenson. Although I have no connection with this
style, I found it shed some valuable light on the aims and functions of this
ryu-ha, recognizing its place in a society that had moved on from the age of
war but still found value in the old practices.

One such work is ‘Muso-Jikiden Eishin Ryu. The Iai Forms and
Oral Traditions of the Yamauchi Branch’ by Yamakoshi Masaki, Tsukimoto Kazutake
and translated by Steven Trenson. Although I have no connection with this
style, I found it shed some valuable light on the aims and functions of this
ryu-ha, recognizing its place in a society that had moved on from the age of
war but still found value in the old practices.

In this post I would like to offer a slightly different perspective
on a theme that arose repeatedly throughout Russo’s study. How should
we think of the supposed secrecy that surrounded the Chinese martial
arts in the West prior to the late 1960s? This is a topic that Russo
treats with a fair amount of nuance.

To begin with, some pretty prominent teachers actually taught western
students prior to the “lifting of the ban”, and even those who did not
personally do so (such as Lau Bun)
had senior students of their own that were more than willing to take up
the torch. Nor is it really clear how many western students were
petitioning these masters for Kung Fu instruction during the 1950s. It
must be remembered that the Chinese martial arts were a pretty esoteric
subject at that point, and not even as popular within their own
community as they would become in later decades. It may have been very
easy to enforce a “teaching ban” in an era when practically no one was
asking to be taught.

Even worse, an over-emphasis on the supposed secrecy of the Chinese
martial arts has had some perverse effects on how we discuss them. As
Paul Bowman (among others) has noted, when we emphasize the “ban” on
outsiders the end result is to throw the charge of racism back on the
Chinese-American community when in fact they were the ones who were
subjected to vast amounts of actual (not imagined) discrimination.

Still, Russo reminds us that we cannot simply dismiss these norms out
of hand. While some Chinese teachers were willing to violate them,
they also report being the victims of various sorts of pressures,
ranging from economic to actual threats of violence. After numerous
interviews he concluded that there was no reason to doubt the accounts
of actual teachers reporting these attitudes within their own
community. Still, by the early 1970s the flood gates were open. So
possible range of years in which a ban could have seriously restricted
the economic freedom of large numbers of potential students and teachers
is actually pretty limited.

All of this is very interesting, but it is well worth remembering
that the Tong associations of either San Francisco or New York did not
monopolize access to, or the public discussion of, these fighting
systems. In the grand scheme of the globalization of the Chinese
martial arts they were rather minor players who had more influence over
members of their own community than the various masters who started to
emigrate directly from China to the west throughout the 20th century (Zheng Manqing being a prime example).
While they may have preferred that traditional hand combat methods not
be taught, or even discussed, with outsiders, other groups had very
different plans.

By the second and third decades of the 20th century
various thinkers in China realized that the martial arts could be
employed as important tools of state building and nationalism. Many of
these efforts drew inspiration from the Japanese use of Budo culture in
these same roles decades earlier. And once the TCMA began to be
reimagined as tools of the state, they immediately became part of
China’s growing “public diplomacy” efforts.

In an earlier time public diplomacy was often referred to as
“propaganda.” This typically refers to coordinated media programs
designed to influence the thoughts and feelings of the citizens of other
countries so that they are more favorably disposed to one’s goals or
preferred policy outcomes. Such efforts can take a variety of forms,
and they can be led either directly by state actors or individuals in
the private sector.

During the Second World War the term propaganda was seriously
discredited and left with only negative connotations. It fell into
disuse, except as a slur. Political scientists and policy makers today
are more likely to speak of “public diplomacy” or “national brand
management.” Still, the basic idea is much the same.

Nor is public diplomacy necessarily a bad thing. It is hard to think
of how it is even possible to address certain pressing problems within
the international system, from deterring the spread of radical religious
identities to building a consensus to fight climate change, without the
skillful use of public diplomacy. It is one of the very basic
implements of diplomacy and statecraft that every country has in their
toolbox.

As Chinese policy makers observed the West’s fascination with
Japanese martial arts such as judo and kendo they quickly realized that
their own fighting systems could play an important role in shaping how
China was perceived by the global public. After all, the West was
looking to the Budo arts to try and understand how the Japanese
“national character” had contributed to their surprising military and
economic rise. Essays on judo and kendo were surprisingly common in the early 20th century, and a fair number of individuals were deciding to try these practices out for themselves.
In contrast, the Western public tended to view the Chinese as
politically disorganized, economically backward, socially insular and
physically weak. This was the climate in which the image of China as
the “Sick Man of East Asia” began to circulate.

By promoting a streamlined and revitalized system of martial arts
training certain policy makers hoped not just to rebuild the domestic
body politic, but also to influence how China was perceived on the
international stage. If the new Republic wished to receive any
assistance in its struggle against Japanese imperialism and later
communism, it was necessary to demonstrate both that the state was
unified and that the people possessed the will to resist oppression.
The discussion of China’s proud martial arts heritage, and recent
efforts to revive and modernize it, could accomplish both of these tasks
at the same time.

This post looks at an even earlier example of the use of the Chinese
martial arts in Republic era public diplomacy. During the spring of
1920 Rodney Gilbert wrote an essay titled “China, Parent of Jiu-Jitsu”
for the aptly named Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information. Later that summer the essay was reprinted in various formats in a number of sources including the North China News in Shanghai (a paper for which Gilbert), the Mid-Pacific Magazine (Volume 20, Number 5), The Literary Digest (May 29th) and the Far East Republic.

Gilbert was a classic example of a unique sort of adventurer that was
drawn to China during the Republic period. He appeared on the other
side of the Pacific flat broke with the intention of becoming a
pharmaceutical salesman, but he quickly found his calling in
journalism. Gilbert lived in China for decades becoming one of the
media’s “old China hands.” He wrote for a number of papers and
eventually ended up having relationships with such prestigious
institutions as the Columbia University School of Journalism.

However, a closer look at this writing quickly reveals that Gilbert
was very conservative. He is best remembered for his many attacks on
communism. Gilbert also played a role in American and Chinese public
diplomacy efforts, writing pieces that supported the Republic’s
government in an attempt to create sympathy among American readers.
During this period he was in frequent contact with political and social
leaders, as well as the OSS (the precursor of the CIA). Nor were
communists his only target. He also wrote a number of pieces supporting
the Chinese government against Japanese aggression.

The longest and most complete versions of this article (which I have
so far been able to locate) appears to be the one published by the Far East Republic, quoted verbatim from the Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information.
I have not been able to find a lot of information on this later
publication. Apparently it only ran for a few years, and its goal was
to print English language articles designed to educate and encourage
support for the Chinese government among Western readers. The profile
of many of its contributors seems to have been similar to Gilbert’s.
Again, many of them were notably conservative writers with connections
to various figures in both the Chinese and western policy
establishments.

Rehabilitating Ma’s image after his notorious crackdown on student
protestors seems to have been one of the specific goals of Gilbert’s
commission. Nor should we overlook the fact that Ma himself had just
published his groundbreaking, four volume, “New Martial Arts of China”
prior to the release of this article. Gilbert obliquely notes the
release of these books before pointing out that various western military
men had examined Ma’s methods and declared that there was nothing here
that could not be adopted by Occidental armies wishing to brush up their
own training.

All of this should remind us that when we approach this article we
are looking at a piece of public diplomacy, emerging from a specific
time and place, with a very specific policy agenda. This is not a work
of disinterested journalism or the product of a trained anthropologist.
In fact, one rather strongly suspects that it was General Ma himself
who commissioned the Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information
to promote both his book and military training system while knocking
the Japanese down a peg. Given his important but colorful place in
modern martial arts history, this is an important possibility to
consider.

Even more critical is to remember that at the same time that the “Old
Tong Code of Silence” may have been in full force in certain
neighborhoods in the US, vastly larger forces were mobilizing around the
idea of promoting the Chinese martial arts on the global stage.
Figures like Ma were well aware of the profound effects of Judo on the
Western discussion of Japan, and they sought to promote the Chinese
martial arts to boost both their own national image and policy goals
abroad.

Perhaps the apex of these efforts would be achieved during the 1936 Olympic Games when Taijiquan was demonstrated
to a receptive global audience. But that should not be understood as a
unique event. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there was a steady drip
of English language articles, books, demonstrations and newsreels all
attempting to bring a more favorable vision of the TCMA into Western
discussions of Chinese society. Rather than focusing on a so called
“code of silence,” the more interesting question might be to ask why
these liberalizing efforts failed to gain greater traction, and how they
came to be so totally forgotten. Yet that is the topic of another
post.

When reviewing Gilbert’s discussion of Chinese martial arts readers
may want to keep two questions in mind. First, did he actually witness
the event that he reports here? While it is generally assumed that the
answer must be yes, I can’t help but notice that Gilbert never actually
claims such in his article. Rather the entire discussion is phrased in
terms of what a theoretical visitor might see if he were able to take in
Ma’s (rightly famous) demonstration. Nor does Gilbert make any claim
to expertise in the Chinese martial arts beyond what he has seen on the
opera stage.

Secondly, note the rhetorical skill with which Gilbert makes an
important two part move. First, he asserts the uniqueness of the
Chinese martial arts and their (historically grounded) superiority to
similar Japanese systems. It is this deep connection to the nation’s
history that makes them (and subsequently Ma’s leadership) uniquely well
suited for the simple Chinese people, turning “loutish coolies” into
modern disciplined soldiers. Yet at the same time, the deep truths
behind these practices are seen to be perfectly compatible with western
norms of progress and efficiency. As a result, it is the western
readers and military officers who can immediately identify the actual
value in Ma’s program, while a reluctant Chinese nation is only now
being convinced to embrace what was best about their past. It is the
Chinese people who are surprised by Ma’s success, but not the western
public.

While Gilbert’s readers reside outside this system of bodily
practice, the author succeeds in creating a sense of belonging to an
“insider” community based on the assumption of shared norms. In that
way readers may be convinced of the value of the martial arts as well as
Ma’s heroic leadership. This dual move also serves to legitimate
China’s place in the global community of nations. It is seen to have a
unique cultural heritage which is, nevertheless, of universal value. It
is exactly this claim which would propel the rise of so many Asian
martial arts during the second half of the 20th century.

Historians have dedicated great tomes to these questions. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West are two prime examples of this line of inquiry.

But another can be found not in a work of non-fiction, but that of historical fiction. In Tides of War,
author Stephen Pressfield provides a fictionalized account of one of
the greatest conflicts in history — the Peloponnesian War — fought
between two of the West’s greatest civilizations: Athens and Sparta.

While Tides of War is a work of historical fiction,
Pressfield went to great lengths to maintain the integrity of the actual
events described, relying on primary sources from Thucydides and other
Greek historians. He also worked to capture the ethos of the time, and
the men who inhabited it.

Peppered in between Pressfield’s thumos–inspiring
depictions of battle, are penetrating deductions about the cultural
forces going on behind the scenes — the differences between the warring
parties’ mindsets and principles, and how these differences led to
mighty, imperialistic Athens falling to modest, republican Sparta.

While the decline of a civilization is often chalked up to economics
or politics, Pressfield theorizes that Athens deteriorated because one
particular aspect of its individual and national character degraded, and
another was substituted in its place.

Sparta and Athens: A Tale of Two City-States

Despite living in close proximity with one another (the cities were
only about 150 miles apart) and sharing the same gods, the Greek
city-states of Athens and Sparta were more different than alike. While
Sparta was more communal (some would even say fascist), Athens
celebrated individual liberty and freedom. While Sparta disdained wealth
and luxury (going as far as outlawing money), Athens was a commercial
empire. While Sparta’s military might lay in their fierce and
indomitable army, Athens ruled the seas with their navy. Sparta was
content with remaining a small and independent city-state; Athens was
much more imperialistic — ever seeking to expand its influence
politically, economically, and culturally.

The Spartans valued things like poetry, music, and philosophy more
than is popularly believed, but such pursuits were decidedly subsumed by
an emphasis on military training. This focus created one of the most
effective, disciplined, and fearless armies in the world. Athens, on the
other hand, celebrated art and philosophy as the pinnacle of human
flourishing, and produced aesthetic masterpieces along with many of the
most influential thinkers and philosophers in Western history, including
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Athens and Sparta differed politically as well. Sparta maintained a
democratic system with a balanced constitution that divided power among
three groups. A system of checks and balances prevented any one group
from gaining too much power. Athenians, on the other hand, governed
themselves under a radical democracy in which every male citizen was
expected to participate.

While Sparta and Athens banded together for the sake of Greek freedom
during the Persian War, they were reluctant allies. Each had long kept a
suspicious watch on the other. Spartans were particularly wary of the
Athenians’ increasing imperialism, believing it was only a matter of
time before they would try to conquer their slice of the Greek
peninsula. It was exactly that fear which led to the thirty-year
Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Though the decades-long
conflict would decimate the power and strength of both city-states,
Sparta emerged the victor.

While both Sparta and Athens had their particular strengths and
weaknesses, by the time of the Peloponnesian War, the latter had
forgotten the apothegm attributed to their mythological law-giver Solon:
“Nothing in excess.” Athenian virtues and ideals were taken to such
extremes that they became vices. Love of individual liberty and
expression degenerated into narcissistic, hyper-individualism; robust
commercial enterprise morphed into unhinged avarice; hardiness and
restraint were replaced with softness and debauchery; active and healthy
democracy devolved into mob rule and demagoguery.

Even the great philosophers of Athens — Socrates and Plato — became
increasingly critical of Athenian degradation, contrasting the
discipline and virtue of the Spartans with the civic and moral decay of
their fellow citizens. They looked on with dismay as a once thriving
culture was slowly eaten by the cancer of decadence.

Spartan Bravery and the Difference Between Courage and Boldness

What was the core difference between Athens and Sparta, then? We’ve
dissected external differences between the city states, but was there a
deeper, foundational quality that the Spartans maintained, and Athenians
lacked, that led to the latter’s decline and ultimate defeat?

In Tides of War, Pressfield uses the Spartan naval admiral
Lysander to give answer to this question. In perhaps the most
stirring scene in the book, Lysander stands before thousands of Spartans
and their allies in the lead-up to the Battle of Notium and gives them a
rousing speech. In it, he lays out the differences between Athens and
Sparta and makes the case for why the Spartan way of life is superior,
and why, in the end, his men will prevail.

For Lysander, the heart of what separates Spartans from Athenians is this:

Andreia, or courage, was the dominating quality of the Spartans; thrasytes, or boldness, was the dominating quality of the Athenians.

For the Greeks, the word andreia meant both courage and manliness. Courage was the sine qua non of being a mature man; the two qualities were inextricably intertwined.Thrasytes, on the other hand, was more of a boyish trait.

While Lysander set up a stark dichotomy between boldness and courage,
acting with the former can occasionally be useful even for a grown man;
sometimes impulsive, even reckless action is needed to seize a fleeting
opportunity.

But where boldness exists, it must always be coupled and harnessed
with courage; courage must be the prevailing quality of a man’s
character.

Why?

In his speech, Lysander elucidates the difference between men who
primarily act from boldness, and those who primarily act from courage,
and details “what kind of man these conflicting qualities produce.”

Below I highlight Lysander’s words from Tides of War, and explore how they applied both to the Spartans, and equally well to men today:

Friday, July 22, 2016

An excerpt from an article at the NY Times on Edward Slingerland's "Trying Not to Try" is below. The full article may be read here.

Just be yourself.

The
advice is as maddening as it is inescapable. It’s the default
prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job
interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws.

Relax. Act natural.

Just be yourself.

But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself? How you can force yourself to relax? How can you try not to try?

It makes no sense, but the paradox is essential to civilization, according to Edward Slingerland.
He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on
millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists
and neuroscientists.

He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.” Pronounced “ooo-way,”it
has similarities to the concept of flow, that state of effortless
performance sought by athletes, but it applies to a lot more than
sports. Wu wei is integral to romance, religion, politics and commerce.
It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist
on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal.

Dr.
Slingerland, a professor of Asian studies at the University of British
Columbia, argues that the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since
humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable
to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived
by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled
people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common
good.

But
there was always the danger that someone was faking it and would make a
perfectly rational decision to put his own interest first if he had a
chance to shirk his duty. To be trusted, it wasn’t enough just to be a
sensible, law-abiding citizen, and it wasn’t even enough to dutifully
strive to be virtuous. You had to demonstrate that your virtue was so
intrinsic that it came to you effortlessly.

Hence
the preoccupation with wu wei, whose ancient significance has become
clearer to scholars since the discovery in 1993 of bamboo strips in a
tomb in the village of Guodian in central China.

The texts on the
bamboo, composed more than three centuries before Christ, emphasize that
following rules and fulfilling obligations are not enough to maintain
social order.

These
texts tell aspiring politicians that they must have an instinctive
sense of their duties to their superiors: “If you try to be filial, this
not true filiality; if you try to be obedient, this is not true
obedience. You cannot try, but you also cannot not try.”

That paradox has kept philosophers and theologians busy ever since, as Dr. Slingerland deftly explains in his new book, “Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity.” One school has favored the Confucian approach to effortless grace, which actually requires a great deal of initial effort.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The Tang
Dynasty was a high point of culture in ancient China. Especially
esteemed were poems. There was no home coming or leave taking; no event
too small to not be commemorated with a poem.

Some
of the best poems of that period have been collected into an anthology
known as The 300 Tang Dynasty Poems. A online version of the anthology
may be found here. Today we have #60:

A DRAWING OF A HORSE BY GENERAL CAO AT SECRETARY
WEI FENG'S HOUSE

Throughout this dynasty no one had painted horses
Like the master-spirit, Prince Jiangdu --
And then to General
Cao through his thirty years of fame
The world's gaze turned, for
royal steeds.
He painted the late Emperor's luminous white horse.
For ten days the thunder flew over Dragon Lake,
And a
pink-agate plate was sent him from the palace-
The talk of the
court-ladies, the marvel of all eyes.
The General danced,
receiving it in his honoured home
After this rare gift, followed
rapidly fine silks
From many of the nobles, requesting that his
art
Lend a new lustre to their screens.
...First came the
curly-maned horse of Emperor Taizong,
Then, for the Guos, a
lion-spotted horse....
But now in this painting I see two horses,
A sobering sight for whosoever knew them.
They are war-
horses. Either could face ten thousand.
They make the white silk
stretch away into a vast desert.
And the seven others with them
are almost as noble
Mist and snow are moving across a cold sky,
And hoofs are cleaving snow-drifts under great trees-
With
here a group of officers and there a group of servants.
See how
these nine horses all vie with one another-
The high clear glance,
the deep firm breath.
...Who understands distinction? Who really
cares for art?
You, Wei Feng, have followed Cao; Zhidun preceded
him.
...I remember when the late Emperor came toward his Summer
Palace,
The procession, in green-feathered rows, swept from the
eastern sky --
Thirty thousand horses, prancing, galloping,
Fashioned, every one of them, like the horses in this picture....
But now the Imperial Ghost receives secret jade from the River
God,
For the Emperor hunts crocodiles no longer by the streams.
Where you see his Great Gold Tomb, you may hear among the pines
A bird grieving in the wind that the Emperor's horses are gone.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

The New Yorker had an interesting article on the science related to our sense of touch. An excerpt is below. The full article may be read here.

On a bitter,
soul-shivering, damp, biting gray February day in Cleveland—that is to
say, on a February day in Cleveland—a handless man is handling a
nonexistent ball. Igor Spetic lost his right hand when his forearm was
pulped in an industrial accident six years ago and had to be amputated.
In an operation four years ago, a team of surgeons implanted a set of
small translucent “interfaces” into the neural circuits of his upper
arm. This afternoon, in a basement lab at a Veterans Administration
hospital, the wires are hooked up directly to a prosthetic hand—plastic,
flesh-colored, five-fingered, and articulated—that is affixed to what
remains of his arm. The hand has more than a dozen pressure sensors
within it, and their signals can be transformed by a computer into
electric waves like those natural to the nervous system. The sensors in
the prosthetic hand feed information from the world into the wires in
Spetic’s arm. Since, from the brain’s point of view, his hand is still
there, it needs only to be recalled to life.

Now
it is. With the “stimulation” turned on—the electronic feed coursing
from the sensors—Spetic feels nineteen distinct sensations in his
artificial hand. Above all, he can feel pressure as he would with a
living hand. “We don’t appreciate how much of our behavior is governed
by our intense sensitivity to pressure,” Dustin Tyler, the fresh-faced
principal investigator on the Cleveland project, says, observing Spetic
closely. “We think of hot and cold, or of textures, silk and cotton. But
some of the most important sensing we do with our fingers is to
register incredibly minute differences in pressure, of the kinds that
are necessary to perform tasks, which we grasp in a microsecond from the
feel of the outer shell of the thing. We know instantly, just by
touching, whether to gently squeeze the toothpaste or crush the can.”

With
the new prosthesis, Spetic can sense the surface of a cherry in a way
that allows him to stem it effortlessly and precisely, guided by what he
feels, rather than by what he sees. Prosthetic hands like Spetic’s tend
to be super-strong, capable of forty pounds of pressure, so the risk of
crushing an egg is real. The stimulation sensors make delicate tasks
easy.

I created this video and wrote the book because my own experience
convinced me that martial arts, dance/theater, and religion were not only
compatible, but were often part of an integrated whole.The deeper I looked into Chinese history and
Chinese religion, the more obvious it was to me that Chinese culture had
integrated martial skills with theatricality in a fully religious
environment.

This has not been a short journey.I’ve been doing Chinese martial arts for 38
years.I was a professional dancer,
dancing many hours a day every day of the week.In the early 1990s when I was deep into dance training, male teachers
were dying of HIV/AIDS in alarming numbers.Those still living were dancing about death a lot. This gave me
countless opportunities to perform in front of audiences; paradoxically, it was
a great time to be a dancer. On the other hand, I wanted more training from
male teachers so I started looking at other other types of movement arts.I became a disciple of Chitresh Das, a master
of Kathak (North Indian Classical Dance), and improvisation.I also studied intensively with Malonga
Casquelourd from the Congo.My studies
of martial arts deepened too.I was
doing movement training 6-10 hours a day.Doing these three types of advanced training at the same time opened my
eyes to things other people were not seeing.It became self-evident to me that Congolese dance, and Kathak dance were
martial arts, and that Chinese martial arts were a form of dance-theater. All
three contained the major elements of martial skills, martial religion, and
theatricality.

By age 30 my interest in performing diminished, but my interest
in practice and training did not. That is when I met a Daoist priest named Liu
Ming in Santa Cruz California.I began
doing the five orthodox Daoist practices: sitting still, the golden-elixir,
liturgy and text studies, daoyin (opening and getting on track), and dream
practice (called: day and night the same). With me, Liu Ming emphasized huge
amounts of reading. After each full weekend of training, he would send me home
with a stack of books and a reading list. This went on for ten years.

I continued to practice and teach gongfu, becoming well
known around San Francisco for teaching kids performance skills and
improvisational life skills inside of the martial arts.I also taught adults at the American College
of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Finally, I returned to one of my teachers from years before,
George Xu. In the old days, training with George had been about being as tough
as possible. 3 to 4 hours a day 6 days a week, plus the practice he expected us
to do outside of class. Now, 15 years later, George Xu had mellowed. He had
been going to China every year to find new teachers to study with, and now all
of his training revolved around emptiness.Amazingly, he had reverse engineered the
golden-elixir practice inside of gongfu training. Since I had been doing
the golden-elixir for more than ten years at that point, I recognized it
immediately.

It quickly occurred to me that if the golden-elixir could be put
into marital skills, it must also have been put into theater training.And all the pieces of the big picture started
to fall into place.

Since I would love people to read the book, I’m just going to
address a single issue here.The biggest
obstacle most people have to comprehending the relationship between martial
arts and theater, is this: People falsely believe that theatrical expressivity
is an obstacle to martial prowess.

Violence professionals must be efficient. Inefficiency is a
luxury only amateurs can afford. Martial skill has to function independently of
expressivity. Even crappy expressivity skills would diminish one’s movement
efficiency if the two were not independent.But most violence professions (I’m talking here about people who break
legs and capture criminals for a living), consider high quality expressivity
and communication skills part of the job description.That’s why expressivity and martial skill
have to be well integrated.

However much theatricality a violence professional happens to
have, it will be fully integrated with their martial skills, and the more
theatricality the better.

As part of that same argument, I often hear, “But that doesn’t
look like the street fights, or bar fights, or the MMA I’ve seen.” That’s
right, every type of violence looks different. Social, asocial, and
environmental contexts determine what fighting looks like.Kidnapping was a big problem in 18th and 19th
Century China.If the biggest danger you
are dealing with is kidnappers who capture by throwing a bag over your head
from behind, your martial art is not going to look like a duel.But it is likely to have high momentum
techniques like butterfly kicks, flips, and long extensions for pushing off of
walls.It is going to have a lot of
simple techniques for breaking legs. If you can understand the context the art
was created for, you can understand the efficiency of the movement.

Here is me doing a movement form Chinese opera call “Butterfly
Breaks Out of his Cocoon.” It is training for some unconventional
chokeholds.